Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Grow Up.

I'd never heard of Asiance Magazine before Jenn wrote this post, and after reading Ms. Bandong's article I doubt I'll return to that site. But while I find the gross characterizations of Asian men in Ms. Bandong's piece unfortunate, I don't understand why every writer who pens anti-Asian male fluff pieces warrants a letter-writing campaign. Certainly people can pursue justice however they see fit, so long as they aren't breaking laws, but I'm a little shocked that people would increase Asiance Magazine public profile with this outcry.

Further, I'm bothered that an obvious 'chick-lit' piece warrants this controversy. I haven't read any more from Ms. Bandong outside of this offending piece, but I would hardly describe that piece as 'feminist' anymore than I'd describe HBO's Sex in the City as 'feminist'. Ms. Bandong wrote a simplistic op-ed detailing her desire for racially fueled excitement based around cultural offence toward (or cultural ignorance of) her family's traditions and culture. That's not female empowerment, or gender equality - it's just adolescent. Ms. Bandong reminded me of teenage girls who pay for tongue and belly button piercings to upset their middle class parents' hard-won suburban apple cart. Her juvenile assumptions that one could build a more exciting relationship with a person who either does not know your family's culture or could care less about abiding by their cultural parameters in their household stuck me as simply uninformed or uncaring about the family disturbances and ostracism those situations create.

And I'm a guy who did not grow up in a household where I removed my shoes upon entering. I dislike doing that now. That's not how I was raised. But when I enter someone else's home and that's what they do, I follow suit. It's their home, after all, and no one ever needed to cajole me into that small common courtesy.

The point? There are serious feminist issues in many American communities of color that minority men have yet to embrace or understand, but when people mistake whimsical dating ruminations for the Asian American answer to The Second Sex, the unneeded and dehumanizing hyperbole abounds all over. Ms. Bandong's piece has nothing to do with feminism - it involves a young woman's immature self-justifications for dating non-Asian men - justifications so below-the-radar unimportant that the minor outcry represented here makes absolutely zero sense.

Lastly - and this is what really bothers me - why can't some Asian American men admit that minority feminism can evolve? What is the problem? I don't expect Black feminists to parrot Sojourner Truth at a Tavis Smiley conference in 2008. Black feminism concerned labor issues then and now, but today's glass ceiling issues must contend with thirty years of higher education advancement where Black women outpace Black men in matriculation and graduation rates. The point isn't that Black sexism has died or that Black feminism is outmoded because by some measures Black women achieve educational and professional success at higher and faster rates than Black men - it's that Black feminism itself must and has evolved to combat other issues that harm Black people in general and Black women in particular: the HIV/AIDS epidemic that exploded among Black women in the past twenty years, for example.

So when Asian men try to assume that all Asian American feminism can be distilled into the political positions or literary licenses on Maxine Hong Kingston or Amy Tan, they pretend that Asian American feminism can't change to suit their own anti-feminist agenda. Yes, given differences in tone and debate topic, this sometimes crosses the rhetorical demilitarized zone into a sexist country where Asian females are likened to humanity's corporate pleasure providers, posable and disposable, and no one - especially Asian men - has to respect their bodies or minds.

I'm convinced that this phenomena lies at the heart of every online Asian male backlash against Asian American feminism I've ever read. To me, it's not that different from the anti-Black female backlash that Anita Hill endured when she testified against Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. On some level, it didn't matter to some professional and public Black men that Justice Thomas was at best a C-level legal mind who spent his entire career dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and New Deal Keynesian economic policies; no for some, all that mattered was that a Black man had a chance to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America, and that a Black woman threatened to destroy that chance. Enter knee-jerk sexism as 'defense of the race', where 'the race' devolves into an aggrieved boys' club without social constraints in it's hatred of uppity women who assert their stories and their pain. If Anita Hill were Chinese, she would have been called a SOW.

So that's the state of gendered discourse in the Asian American community today - men add porcine qualities to the sexist overkill of the phrase 'sellout whore', causing very few Asian American women to brave the sexist backlash online long enough to develop lasting institutions that nurture Asian American feminist thought. Not for nothing, but Reappropriate.com did have a sizable amount of female posters over the years; I fear the unreasonable craziness and personal attacks during repeated interracial relationship debates from Asian American men have taught many women not to comment.

And that's just sad.

Because it shows that minority sexism exists, has real consequences in the real world, and damages the range of acceptable commentary in minority communities. Denying feminism's utility matters. Antagonism toward interracial dating by Asian American women - and all the anti-Asian female misogyny and sexism that always emergent topic provides - has become the shibboleth that Asian men use to unify their community online, and this byte-sized good ol' boys networking dehumanizes and disrespects Asian women as much as any Chinese Laundry advertisement or mail-order bride webpage or Kobe Tai 'love you long time' pornography.

So no, I don't condemn Ms. Bandong. I ask her to perform the same task I ask of many of the Asian American men I've read in comments here, and on Fighting 44's and Model Minority.com.

Grow up.



Update: Jaehwan pens a response blog on the Fighting 44's site. Although I fear that Jaehwan's perspective clings desperately to the unnecessary and unfair notion that Asian American feminism is irrevocably defined by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, his argument provides a useful and well-written counterargument to the views presented here (even if I don't agree with it), so check it out. (3/27/08, 7:33 AM PST)

posted by James | 10:55 AM | permalink

33 Comments:

Post a Comment

Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes


Scabs, Guts and Peanut Butter

Powered by Blogger